Slowly they came, and he held them in place, visualizing his hotel room just as he had visualized his office minutes before. He concentrated. Harder. Harder. Harder. HAR—
"Sir Kenneth!" a voice said. "Will you please stop standing there with your eyes closed and help me with this poor child? She's fainted."
Malone's eyes popped open, but for a minute he wasn't entirely sure he'd opened them. His visualization blended almost perfectly with the reality of the room around him. There was only one jarring difference.
He had certainly never visualized the richly-dressed figure of Queen Elizabeth I standing in the center of the room.
"Now, now," she said. "Thinking like that can only lead to confusion. Come over here and help me."
Dorothea was on the couch. Between them, they managed to wake her gently, and she sat up and stared around at them and the room. "I'm sorry," she said dazedly. "It's just that I didn't expect you to turn into a little old lady in Elizabethan costume. Just a bit disconcerting." She blinked. "By the way, who is she?"
"This," Malone said with a sense of some foreboding, "is Queen Elizabeth I."
"She's dead," Dorothea said decisively.
"Not really, my dear," the Queen said. "Actually, you see ... well, it's too long to explain now." She gave everybody a bland smile.